Setting Alive Your Corporate Website With Social Media
The future of web experiences is based around people and not products - A bold yet a perfectly practical statement that underlines the importance of social media today and the power of engaging and interacting directly with your customers.
Social networking websites, which have become a hub for marketing and promotional activities at a breathtaking pace, will soon turn into dangerous shark waters, filled with Digital Marketing experts vying for a web-citizen's time.
But not if you have a perfectly organized and functional strategy in place! Social media champions the cause of the customer and how he/she views your product or service as and it is up to you to make the most potent use for the desired benefits.
Keep this in mind.
If you don't have an effective Social Media presence, then your rival most probably does.
A strong social networking presence always keeps you on your toes about what your fans/visitors are talking about you and what perception do they have about your company or brand.
This information serves as an invaluable resource to build future brand strategies.
This is one of the prime reasons that almost every brand today has a Follow Me (For Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking profile) on its corporate website or on any kind of online or offline promotion.
A skeptical viewpoint would be that why would anyone want to redirect a visitor from his/her website to another social networking website? Why not keep the customer glued to your website for maximum exposure? If you have this in mind then your corporate website serves as the first point of contact between you and the probable future customer.
Therefore the importance of a great first impression cannot be overstated.
Once you have the attention of the visitor, the next step is to expose this visitor to the kind of content that would transform this visitor into a client for your company.
This distance between a visitor and a customer can be shortened by tweaking your corporate website in a way that visitors remain engaged and (if you're lucky) share your company, product or service info with their friends and family.
Now let us look at the challenges which your company faces in getting the maximum out of your corporate website.
Lately, the word "Integration" has been thrown around a lot in the digital marketing space, and for a good reason too! Integrating your corporate website with your social networking presence can be the boost that your website has always been looking for.
Having a strong presence in the social networking spheres is a great thing.
But what if you take it a step further by aggregating the content from a social networking site onto your corporate website? This would completely bypass the usual redirects from a social networking site (say your company's Facebook Fan page) and enable users to login to their Facebook or Twitter account from your corporate website.
In this way, you are able to bring the visitors directly to your website and expose them to the content of your liking.
From there they can share the product or service info directly with their other online friends.
Take the example of Pepsi's Refresh project, which successfully integrated the social networking platform with its corporate website.
Another example would of Levi's official website, which encourages you to login with your Facebook or Twitter handles from its website and share the website content directly.
One of the biggest benefits of such a strategy is that the content on your website is automatically refreshed and updated - say through regular Tweets or selected conversations from the top discussions on blogs or communities.
This serves as a low cost strategy to come-up with instant content for your website.
A flip-side to this could be the lack of control which you might have on the kind of content which is being written by users on your social networking platform.
The era of seamless integration has just begun and the digital marketing space would surely clog itself out and it's upto you to connect these digital dots for a better roadmap for your brand or company.
Social networking websites, which have become a hub for marketing and promotional activities at a breathtaking pace, will soon turn into dangerous shark waters, filled with Digital Marketing experts vying for a web-citizen's time.
But not if you have a perfectly organized and functional strategy in place! Social media champions the cause of the customer and how he/she views your product or service as and it is up to you to make the most potent use for the desired benefits.
Keep this in mind.
If you don't have an effective Social Media presence, then your rival most probably does.
A strong social networking presence always keeps you on your toes about what your fans/visitors are talking about you and what perception do they have about your company or brand.
This information serves as an invaluable resource to build future brand strategies.
This is one of the prime reasons that almost every brand today has a Follow Me (For Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking profile) on its corporate website or on any kind of online or offline promotion.
A skeptical viewpoint would be that why would anyone want to redirect a visitor from his/her website to another social networking website? Why not keep the customer glued to your website for maximum exposure? If you have this in mind then your corporate website serves as the first point of contact between you and the probable future customer.
Therefore the importance of a great first impression cannot be overstated.
Once you have the attention of the visitor, the next step is to expose this visitor to the kind of content that would transform this visitor into a client for your company.
This distance between a visitor and a customer can be shortened by tweaking your corporate website in a way that visitors remain engaged and (if you're lucky) share your company, product or service info with their friends and family.
Now let us look at the challenges which your company faces in getting the maximum out of your corporate website.
Lately, the word "Integration" has been thrown around a lot in the digital marketing space, and for a good reason too! Integrating your corporate website with your social networking presence can be the boost that your website has always been looking for.
Having a strong presence in the social networking spheres is a great thing.
But what if you take it a step further by aggregating the content from a social networking site onto your corporate website? This would completely bypass the usual redirects from a social networking site (say your company's Facebook Fan page) and enable users to login to their Facebook or Twitter account from your corporate website.
In this way, you are able to bring the visitors directly to your website and expose them to the content of your liking.
From there they can share the product or service info directly with their other online friends.
Take the example of Pepsi's Refresh project, which successfully integrated the social networking platform with its corporate website.
Another example would of Levi's official website, which encourages you to login with your Facebook or Twitter handles from its website and share the website content directly.
One of the biggest benefits of such a strategy is that the content on your website is automatically refreshed and updated - say through regular Tweets or selected conversations from the top discussions on blogs or communities.
This serves as a low cost strategy to come-up with instant content for your website.
A flip-side to this could be the lack of control which you might have on the kind of content which is being written by users on your social networking platform.
The era of seamless integration has just begun and the digital marketing space would surely clog itself out and it's upto you to connect these digital dots for a better roadmap for your brand or company.